Last night at work I was talking to a friend about my risky PALNet investment. I told him I was a 'whale' and control well over 1% of the inflation pool.
I can create 100 coins a day.
Cool, how much is a coin worth?
Right now, 17 cents.
17 cents
It was at this moment that the full ROI perspective hit me.
$1.70 a vote.
$17 a day.
$510 a month.
WHAT?!
$510 a month? I've only spent 5000 Steem ($2000) acquiring coins. So it would only take 4 months of self-upvoting to make all my money back and still have 22000 PAL leftover? That can't be right... but it is.
This can't be sustainable.
A brief moment of panic creeps though me when I think about this.
If something sounds too good to be true...
Then it usually is.
So, that's a bit rattling. The monstrosity allowing me to create all that inflation is the 12.6 million PAL sell wall on Steem-Engine. All those coins with no owners... just sitting there... generating inflation. Even though I only have 22000 staked coins I'm creating inflation like I have 200,000.
Best case scenario, PALNet generates enough value to clear the sell wall and distribute all 12.6 million coins to a healthy decentralized community.
Where does that 12.6 million Steem go?
Well, it's supposed to power up the 
But... 12.6 million Steem... wtf?
Can you image what happens if PALNet actually gets 12.6 million Steem? That's 4% of all coins in existence. Multiply that by 3 to 12% if you're just looking at liquid coins that aren't powered up.
Can you imagine how much the price of Steem would go up if PALNet generates enough value to take all those liquid coins off the market? In effect, the value of PALNet also increases when the value of Steem increases because of the peg and the PAL-Steem trading pair on Steem-Engine.
Is this a reasonable expectation?
I'm thinking it can't be. I'm thinking PALNet will be forced to burn away the remaining sell wall at some point and let the free market decide the value of PAL. A moment like this might be a full year away, but it will be looming unless PALNet is somehow able to generate that value that would justify the 12.6 million sell wall being bought out.
Time for Exploits?
This makes me think that maybe I should be exploiting the system as an act of defiance to the sell wall. Just upvote myself and keep dumping all my coins on the market to show that too much inflation is being created for the sell wall to ever be bought out in the first place.
The other less dipshit option is to try and bring value to PALNet so that both PAL and Steem gain value. I already have a bunch of ideas on that front that I have explicitly detailed, so that's what I'll do.
Conclusion
PALNet is not decentralized. Whoever controls SCOT bot controls everything. That means exploiting the system isn't really an option because they can just slap you down at this point.
However, that doesn't really matter, because I didn't come here for ROI. I came here to bring value to an open source community. That's what I intend to do.
I've decided to strip my DrugWars bot down to the foundation and rebuild it into a Steem-Engine liquidity-maker bot. Maybe I'll bring some value to Steem-Engine and even make some money while I'm at it.
Regardless, PALNet should seriously consider stopping the sell wall from generating inflation. Those 12.6 million dead coins are going to mint 1.26 million new coins over the next year. What percent of those 1.26 million PAL will be used to undercut the sell wall?
We can see that the way things are set up is completely unsustainable unless PALNet develops quite a bit of value. Honestly, they just might do it. It certainly feels like they are cranking out product 10 times faster than Steemit Inc ever could.
P. S.
As a large stake holder, 50% curation is pretty fun. You can splash coins around everywhere and half of them still get kicked back to you. Maybe Steem's EIP won't be such an utter disaster.